LaTex for the Scientist

Offered by:LuciLinX with Michaël Heymann
Level:Beginners
When:11 January 2012
Where:CRP-Santé (1, rue Thomas Edison, Strassen), room Schumpeter (entrance B, then left).
Duration:9 - 5 pm
Requirements:Bring your own laptop. Must be able to boot on a CD or have a virtualization tool installed (e.g. VirtualBox or KVM/Qemu) in order to use the disc that will be provided for this course (ask your IT team, if you’re not administrator of your computer).
Restrictions:First-come first-serve
Registration:By email to Michaël Heymann
Contact:michael DOT heymann AT ibbl DOT lu

Description:

When it comes to “latex”, a scientist might believe that one is referring to some kind of material his protecting gloves are made of ;-) . No, here we are talking about LaTeX (note the lower/upper case), a document markup language and a document preparation system. It is widely used in the scientific community due to his unparalleled ability to produce beautiful documents, rigorous typesetting and complex equations as well as his seamless integration to the IT tools commonly used in academia for decades, even before the advent of GUI-based operating systems.

Because LaTeX has its roots in Unix and command-line environments, it is a common belief that the system is very complicated to master. While it is true that the learning curve is steep and that the amount of information available might intimidate the beginner, this workshop aims at giving a knowledge sufficient enough to easily compose a broad range of documents (including a scientific paper) and give the audience the desire to learn more about this powerful system.

Preliminary plan

    Introduction
  • Why to use LaTeX ?
  • History
  • Common tools
    First document
  • Basic commands
  • Styles
  • Tables
    More advanced features
  • Generating TOC & "true" indexes
  • Using classes & modules
  • Drawing
    Hold on, isn't this workshop entitled "LaTeX for the Scientist" ???
  • Bibliographies with BibTeX
  • Mathematics, chemistry, biology... ...and more !
  • Bye, bye Powerpoint: welcome beamer.
  • Publish a paper in Oxford Bioinformatics ! ;-)